Change, it turns out, wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. Having campaigned for the past year as the agent of transformation, the man who would lead an historic shift in America's political direction, Barack Obama is discovering that there is quite a lot he likes about the way things are.
Gerard Baker, for the Times of London commenting about The Obama's recent habits of mutability.
Evolving positions are a fact of political life, if one were to be such a stalwart as to never change any of their positions, that politician would look a fool.
But the candidate of change has brought changeability to a level that very nearly resembles an artform. He not only changes his mind, he has done it within the very same day on a few occasions.
Now that's Change We Can Believe In!
He's not the first Muslim major party candidate for President, The Obama is pure Zen, baby.
He reminds me of this little story:
Kitano Gempo, abbot of Eihei temple, was ninety-two years old when he passed away in the year 1933. He endeavored his whole life not to be attached to anything. As a wandering mendicant when he was twenty he happened to meet a traveler who smoked tobacco. As they walked together down a mountain road, they stopped under a tree to rest. The traveler offered Kitano a smoke, which he accepted, as he was very hungry at the time.
"How pleasant this smoking is," he commented. The other gave him an extra pipe and tobacco and they parted.
Kitano felt: "Such pleasant things may disturb meditation. Before this goes too far, I will stop now." So he threw the smoking outfit away.
When he was twenty-three years old he studied I-King, the profoundest doctrine of the universe. It was winter at the time and he needed some heavy clothes. He wrote his teacher, who lived a hundred miles away, telling him of his need, and gave the letter to a traveler to deliver. Almost the whole winter passed and neither answer nor clothes arrived. So Kitano resorted to the prescience of I-King, which also teaches the art of divination, to determine whether or not his letter had miscarried. He found that this had been the case. A letter afterwards from his teacher made no mention of clothes.
"If I perform such accurate determinative work with I-King, I may neglect my meditation," felt Kitano. So he gave up this marvelous teaching and never resorted to its powers again.
When he was twenty-eight he studied Chinese calligraphy and poetry. He grew so skillful in these arts that his teacher praised him. Kitano mused: "If I don't stop now, I'll be a poet, not a Zen teacher." So he never wrote another poem.
The Obama avoids attachment to any one position, The Obama only needs for you to believe in the rightness of his actions at the time of the acting. If the exact opposite is called for just a moment later, than that too was the right action.
Also reminds me a bit of Heraclitus, 'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.'
He's the first candidate to have attended higher education after postmodernism had taken over, and he seems to learned the lessons of a generalized antipathy to the belief that there is such thing as an objective truth very well.
There are no 'truths', so there can be no 'flip flops' (except of course, the kind that Matt McConaughey loses)
2 comments:
You have missed the worst aspect of Obama's mutability: His insistance that he NEVER changes his position on anything, and that those who say he has are either lying or weren't listening to the subtleness of his earlier stated position.
You're right, of course, but you forgot to add that not only did you miss the nuance if you accuse Him of racism, but to accuse The Obama of anything (other than crapping sorbet, and pissing lemonade) is RACIST.
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